[goos]

Having worked in both Stockholm and San Francisco, living in the latter is definitely _far_ more expensive. My apartment in Stockholm was _much_ nicer than the one I had in San Francisco, despite having a much lower salary. And that's Stockholm, which has experienced a housing bubble of its own over the past decade, so it's pretty expensive by European standards.

Now, you can get a lot more for your money outside of San Francisco while staying in the US, but that applies to European cities as well.

Don't get me wrong – US pay still outweighs these lower costs as a young engineer without children. If you're planning on starting a family, things get a little muddier. Having a child is free in Sweden, whereas it ranges from thousands to tens of thousands in San Francisco. Childcare in Sweden is progressively prized and never goes above ~$100/month, while it ranges from thousands of dollars a month in San Francisco, to hundreds in other parts of the US. School? Yup, that one's free too – college and the works. Got elderly parents? Elderly care is also subsidized to ~$300 a month (although private alternatives do exist).

However, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and these things do need to be paid for. This is done by many different taxes. Working as a contractor, you become painfully aware of a few of these – I've contracted for an American company while based in Sweden, at American rates, and I still end up with way less than I did working in the US.

First off you have your payroll tax at ~31%. Normally this cost is quietly absorbed by the employer, so from the get-go almost a third of your salary is gone without you knowing it. After that point, you have a progressive income tax that can go as high as 60% – which is what employees see on their pay stubs.

So they're just different models. The European model largely optimizes for a high common denominator, whereas the US model seems to optimize for extremes.